Kevin John Bozelka

Sunday, September 25, 2005

4 Easy Steps Towards World Domination For United State of Electronica

Thank Jack Smith that La Gurney reads The Austin Chronicle. He (Gurney, that is) calls me up Sat. afternoon and tells me that The AC tells him that United State of Electronica are playing at Emo's...for FREE! Fuk yeah, baby bitch! Not even a big dicked visit from Jeremy Penn could make me refuse such an offer (well...). Anyhoo, Mrs. Gurney, Grigs, John Lennon's grandmother, and I make it past a cute (but kinda mean) door boy (oh, and a murder of HOT are-they-of-age gymnast-lookin types who all booked before the show) just in time for a CRIZAPPY opening band. Forgot the name too. Something like Kaiser Chiefs but with "Whales" in it (Kinship Whales?). Lead singer looked like El Señor Coconut. Did NOT sound like Freddie Mercury (sadly). The sound? Imagine some sort of conceptual electro act (Peaches maybe or for you Montréal gens, Lederhosen Lucille) filtered through rockish bar bandisms. Too guitary. Mais pourquoi? Shit, after that wet fart start, even Leann Rimes (or Palace) coulda cleaned up. (Random bizarre sighting: a rack of clothing under heating lamps [were they edible?] next to the merch table. Not t-shirts but rather, jackets and button-up shirts and such. And a hat bearing the Kinship Whales imprimatur.)

U.S.E. were even better this time than their two SXSW showcases. The audience energy level was a tad low towards the beginning. But that just made the crowd-width wad of cum splattered onto us about two songs before the "IT IS ON!" climax all the more disco-rock euphoric. These clearly hard-touring Seattlites have their Donna Summer down. The loud guitars propel the disco forward and the disco always reminds the guitars that their ultimate role is boogie oogie oogie. "Hot Stuff"-"Bad Girls"-"Hot Stuff"-"Bad Girls." Thesis-antithesis-thesis-antithesis-SYNTHESIS!

As Eric Weisbard pointed out in an early 1990s Voice piece on Rhino and cheese theory, the synthesis that classic disco achieved was welding camp sophistication to Hi-NRG. You could have it both ways (often at the same time): the camp sophistication insured that the music would be suitable for posing to (or simply luxuriating in its ever upwardly mobile production) while the Hi-NRG lit your buttcheeks on fuckin' fire. U.S.E. unquestionably got the buttcheek lighting down. But they trade the camp for a laid-back, even hippie vibe (which is probably why their music reminds me ever so vaguely of goa trance except that it's not, ya know, horribly shitty piddle). So you could bob your head from side to side with the dazed smile of someone who just taught the world to sing AND/OR you could hop around like Smiley The Potato Chip (whoever the hell that was - I seem to remember him/it referenced to in an Creem caption accompanying a photo of B-52 Fred Schneider). I did both myself.

Obviously, this band needs to take over the planet. So here are a few modest proposals for world domination:

1. Get more verse-chorus-versey without sacrificing each song's expansiveness.

Not that the songs are sooo expansive. The lengths correspond to Top 40 norms and hooks poke out to say hello. But often, the ferocious groove threatens to overwhelm the song structures that are already there. So maybe a production that will bring those structures out a bit more, oui?

2. Channel The Doobie Brothers.

A crucial source for both the laid-backness and the funk. As I mentioned to La Gurney after the show, it was no accident that The Doobs were the one country-rock band recontextualized for the dancefloor in the 1990s (I have a bootleg 12" featuring a nifty houseification of "Long Train Runnin'"). They simply boogied better than Poco, Firefall or The Eagles. And if U.S.E. can come up with something that sums up a sexual clime as perfectly as "What A Fool Believes," they could knock Kanye West off his number one perch (or at least inspire Michael McDonald to stop dressing like your plumber).

3. Release a live album.

Never thought I'd live to say this about anyone but they sound much better live than on disc. Not entirely sure why either. For sure, the visual of a group of people who definitely didn't sit at the same lunch table in high school helps. And missing from the disc is the scandalously popist drum machine that keeps beating in between songs. Also some chaos - it's too clean. I know the good times don't always travel over to the live album. But it's worth a shot.

4. Pick a leader.

This one saddens me because what's so beautiful about U.S.E. is that they seem like a true collective - the burnouts and the AV geeks and the theatre queens and the foreign exchange students and the spazzes and the class clowns united on one stage. But the Hot 100 has traditionally had little use for everybody is a star. So pick a star, preferably someone who can sing like Donna Summer (or at least fake it like that great faker).

Saturday, September 24, 2005

January + Dekker = ? (Jandek in Austin)

Through some scary harmonic convergence I don’t even want to begin to ponder, I wound up living in the same city where Jandek would play his first ever live show in the US (and mere days before he officially became my object of inquiry for the Authorship course I’m taking this semester). The husband couldn’t (and really didn’t want to) make it. So I gave my esteemed colleague Dave Gurney a late b-day present. Someone’s flesh had to be available for clawing in case things got too intense.

And intense it was. Not the music. Never the music. Rather, it was all the transitional moments that stirred the humors – waiting before, pondering afterward, the “oh gawd, what if someone shouts ‘I love you, Jandek!’?” silences between songs. As always with Janky (and me), the music was an avenue to something much more compelling, starting with the creepy ass venue itself, The Scottish Rite Temple. I mean, where ELSE would Jandek hold his coming out party but the playground of the Freemasons, one of those truths that are out there (but not really) in The X-Files?

Floating past an array of dusty old white men scowling at us from busts and oil canvases, Dave and I found seats about 5 or 6 rows back stage left. We sat behind two beautiful guys, one absolutely gorgeous tall blond boy (with a modest nose ring, if I remember correctly) and a shorter Seth Tisue lookalike. I saw blondie alone outside and assumed he wasn’t with the other dude. And indeed, they didn’t talk to one another for quite some time before the show began. But after a few exchanges which I took to be polite stranger sociability, blondie leaves and returns with a water for the other boy. Were they a quiet indie boy couple? Or was a love connection made?

After several sotto voce stomach ache admissions to Dave, Jandek took the stage precisely at 7:30pm. There he was, my beloved referent, making a path behind the two drum sets like a just-busted grammar school student choosing the longest route possible to get to teacher’s desk for his punishment. There were three other musicians including a HOT little drummer boy who I later found out was one Nick Hennies, a local noisemaker. I watched him as much as Jandek and not only because I was rehearsing fantasy scenarios in which I card him for cigarettes. In a kind of performer-conductor rapport, he kept looking at Janky for some sort of cues. At one point, Janky even smiled at him and Hottie Hennies smiled back.

But cues for what exactly? The unsurprisingly discordant music sounded like the product of people with nothing to say to one another. Now I’m sure someone out there will fire back that these four men were as in tune with each other as four men have ever been. And he (no doubt it’ll be a he) can back it up with musicological evidence. For sure, I’m no expert on this kind of stuff. I still don’t get Coltrane’s Interstellar Space and much as I adore 1970s Miles, it’s largely fantastically funky workout music to me (which is more than enough).

But let’s face it. WE were Jandek’s punishment that night. After all, this is a man for whom interacting with anyone has likely always felt like some sort of punishment. That’s why it was no surprise (to me, at least) that he never once addressed the audience – because there’s always a chance that we’ll answer back. After the show, a fan from Arkansas bravely admitted that he wished the man said at least one thank you to us. But for every person like me who appreciated such honesty, there are two (or more) who would have found it clueless, hopelessly out of sync with whatever makes Jandek a genius of sorts.

I imagine that this latter group comprises most of the “music over the myth” clan. But whatever pleasure they took in the music that night, it couldn’t have much to do with synergy. Rather, it inhered in discordance which, in this context, I take to mean an opportunity to “say” something with no fear that someone will “say” something back. Jandek isn’t the only person who experiences the entire world as a punishment. And for those who share this particularity with him, this is their music. But then why a concert? (I guess this is why the word “show” has more currency in relation to indie/underground/outsider sounds – it masks the interaction inherent in “concert.”)

Not that I didn’t enjoy the discord in fits and starts myself. The songs were best at their most DNA-like – you know, songs like “Not Moving” that actually kinda moved. One relatively windy number excoriating cops still stands out. But in the end, can discordance really build a musical community? Were we not all discrete little pulsations of self-interest once the curtain closed (and even after)?

Look, I know I overrate the community building aspects of groove. Gurney pointed this out to me in what turned out to be the most eloquent defense of prog rock known to me. Went something like this (through my distortion pedals, of course): “People who listen to prog rock aren’t comfortable with their bodies and those meter changes every measure reflect that fact. You, Kevin, require groove because you ARE comfortable with your body.” Which, in a way, is a laugh if you’ve ever seen my chunky A, a fact made brutally clear to me while watching a video of myself teaching yesterday.

But what can I do? It’ll take a while to lose the weight. And even then, will Sterling Smith still fuck me tomorrow? The public sphere is a punishment to us all. All egos are battered things, sez Freud/Terry Eagleton. Some of us just take it harder than others, e.g. Jandek. That predicament makes for a lot of shite music from Emerson, Lake and Palmer to Smog. What pulls Jandek out from this muck is that he actually shines light on these public sphere dilemmas rather than smothering them in bullshit mysticism and Appalachian alligator tears.

So in the absence of some changing same from the band, the pleasure I took in the evening was a “perversely” pop one. The non-interaction, the antisocial cauterwaul of the music that impelled you not to listen, the (ironic? campy? merely solemn?) pageantry with which he packed up his guitar – all went towards a Warholesque attempt to be in the public sphere but not of it, to express oneself but not. Like Sun Ra, like Prince, like Milli Vanilli, like New Order (all to varying degrees), Jandek has found a way to do it. A live show “merely” ups the stakes (as it does for all the artists listed above, again with varying degrees of threat involved). Jandek was seeing how far into publicity he could still remain cloaked and his dance with fire that night was thrilling to witness.

And yet writing all this in the wake of Katrina and her waves (not to mention lovely Rita), I cannot help but see this testing of the limits of publicity as an ultimately privileged affair. Katrina is one of those moments when we’re all supposed to drop the pose and help our brothers and sisters out. As such, it’s a model for the socialist revolution to come – a pathetic and probably clueless model but hey, at least it’s better than Christmas. But could an artist like Jandek, where a huge gap between performer and audience is part of what makes him signify, respond to Katrina in any meaningful way? And I ask this as someone who, on one level, doesn’t want to see that gap disappear and not as someone holier than thou who’s clocked in countless hours helping victims (because I haven’t). That gap is a reminder to us that everyday life (its codes, its processes, its ability to churn out Jandeks, for better or worse) is an enemy. So far, the negation of everyday life that Jandek has embarked upon seems to have worked. But only for him, in any absolute sense. So is it even possible to use that (valuable, I say) lesson in the face of thousands whose everyday lives have been quite literally negated by Katrina?

And come the revolution, will there be cake mix (as my bud Jessica Wurster is wont to ask)? Well, forget cake mix, sez I. I fucked up mac & cheese and needed serious help with Hamburger Helper. But which of these will be around come the revolution? Sun Ra? (Dead already.) Milli Vanilli? (1/2 dead already, you fucking bastards!) Prince? (Probably.) New Order? (Gawd, I fuckin’ hope so!!!) Jandek?

Monday, September 19, 2005

Fave 100 Singles of the 1970s

The rankings for these will never ever change. I forgot NOTHING. Also, there's nothing personal about my selections. These are scientifically the greatest singles of their respective decades. Feel free, however, to send me date, label, year, exact title, etc. corrections.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Review of Roni Size: New Forms

Here's an ancient review of Roni Size's New Forms from the dearly departed (and pretty well paying) Addicted to Noise. All the good ideas come in the last five paragraphs when I'm ripping on it.

New Forms, Roni Size (Mercury)

Bass and Drums

By Kevin John

Believe the hype. New Forms is one of the greatest drum and bass albums ever. Recent drum and bass albums from Photek and Jamie Myerson operate under the same lazy, conceited assumption that informs the aimlessness of most compilations - namely, that the inexorable clickety-clack of drum patterns loop-locked at 150 BPM can stand in for the absence of musical ideas exciting, affective or melodic enough to fill 250 bars of music. Because there is no such lack in the upper stratum of New Forms, Size and his collective can weave their bottoms in and out of the voices and "real" musicians, splitting the difference between drum and bass and bringing themtogether only when dramatically expedient.

Toward the end of the title track, Bahamadia's rap stops after it's built rising action for the last five minutes. Just when you get sick of wondering exactly where her repeated verse will take you next, the drums drop out allowing a creeping bass line to create suspense on its own before the jittery jungle jerk of the drums kicks back in for a satisfying climax. This simple rhythmic formula recalls the tense foreplay that P-Funk held off until they splattered cum all over their Fun Fur diapers. As such, it tells more exciting and sexier stories than the voices do.

Of course, the voices (most of which belong to women – a refreshing development in such a boy's game) along with the "real" instruments are this album's calling card. The great throw-away rap in "Railing," the double bass and drums interplay of "Brown Paper Bag," and the sung melody of"Heroes" all enable the listener to recall these tracks simply by hearing their names dropped by some bandwagoneer at a party. Those not accustomed to dancing in k-holes will have no problem shaking a rump to the fat-bottomed whomp of "Watching Windows." Even the genre's formerly prohibitivespeediness is rendered palatable by the slowing effect of the vocals and the constant play of the rhythms. All very nice.

But blessing New Forms one of the greatest drum and bass albums ever does not mean it's a great album. A good album? Sure. A great one? Pah! New Forms forces the future rather than simply being something new under the sun.

Take the opening line of "Share the fall": "Can you see what I see? The Future!" And, indeed, it sounds like the future, say a television spot for commercial inter-planetary flights from some bad sci-fi film. That is, the staccato cheese of Onallee's vocals transforms the track into a quaint idea of what the future will sound like and, as such, is no more innovative than the cantina music in Star Wars.

No doubt this strained, unintentional campiness stems from Reprazent's holy insertion of organic matter into their techno-utopia which betrays a sneaking sense that drum and bass is no good "on its own"; that it must aspire to such high-falutin' art forms as jazz and poetry in order to be significant.

In this context, it's easy to understand why this vaguely clichéd milestone has elicited the almighty cliché comparison to Sgt. Pepper. But, if anything, New Forms is too Sgt. Pepper before there was even a drum and bass Meet the Beatles to "improve upon" (if the Jungle Massive compilation from a few years back was it, we're all doomed). Drum and bass hasn't played out its fun, parents-just-don't-understand spirit enough to justify turning it into a respectable art form yet. In fact, it's not even close.

And if we're to judge New Forms as a double CD, then it is altogether an unmitigated flop. Most critics give the second disc a cursory mention if they don't ignore it altogether. That's because it bears the same relationship as the second disc of New Order's Substance (compact disc version) did to its first disc, i.e., a disc of remixes and other useless odds and ends (but not edits, oh no, never edits). The difference is, of course, that Substance was a greatest hits collection whereas New Forms is the Size crew's first pompous outing. Have you ever heard the prediction that in the future bands will debut with their greatest hits? Well, the future is here folks! So here's a proposition for the post-future that doesn't shoot so high: how 'bout a drum and bass album that lasts thirty-five minutes? Now there's something new!!